Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Let’s Talk #GamerGate #NotYourShield and George Orwell

I was asked what #Gamergate was over twitter this weekend,
since I’ve been rather active in it based on an
article posted on August 28th on Gamasutra. So I’ll start this post off with the
conclusion which is this: #Gamergate is a fundamental rejection of an orthodoxy
presented by a set of totalitarian fake journalists corrupt to the core. #NotYourShield is a simultaneous double
fundamental rejection of that orthodoxy by the very people the fake journalists
said didn’t exist as “gamers” in the fake journalists’ orthodoxy. If you’ll pardon the dystopian science
fiction pun what was attempted in the days leading up to and over Labor Day weekend was nothing short of Orwell 101.

Ok, to set this whole thing up, we need some context. The Orwell I’m talking about is 1984. It was written and published in the late
1940s as an indictment of the totalitarian regimes that were dividing up the
world after the end of World War II. The
main points are these: a totalitarian government was controlling thought itself
by controlling information and language that could be used (Newspeak,
Doublethink), and destroying the any opposing viewpoint so utterly that no hope
of revolution could occur. The book
follows Winston Smith, a worker bee at the Ministry of Truth. The Ministry of Truth is where the information
was sanitized to be correct relative to the orthodoxy of the moment. Okay, now
on to how Orwell relates to #Gamergate and #NotYourShield.

In the case of #Gamergate and #Notyourshield, playing the
role of Winston Smith’s colleagues at the Ministry of Truth are the fake
journalists mentioned in the opening, including Leigh Alexander, Casey
Johnston, Patricia Hernandez, Nathan Grayson, Tim Colwill, Luke Plunkett, Dan
Golding, Chris Plante, Fenriff, Andrew Todd, and Devin Wilson. They work for the Ministry of Truth in the
form of Kotaku, Polygon, Ars Technica, games.on.net, Gamasutra, Badass Digest,
Destructoid, and blog on Tumblr.
Their job at Minitrue is to craft the orthodoxy that’s
imposed upon every resident of Oceania, which in our case is anyone who
consumes their writing. At no time was that orthodoxy more apparent than the
#Gamergate #NotYourShield saga’s equivalent to 1984’s 2 Minutes Hate on August
28th.

Article, after article, after article, after article, after article
appeared on the same day, over 10 all told, to boldly proclaim that the gamer
identity was dead. Orly? This is one aspect of the orthodoxy crafted
by the names listed above. Another article extended the orthodoxy by trying
to give a playlist of sorts for how to “end”, meaning kill, gamers.

How does one define the orthodoxy of these fake journalists? Well, first, “gamer” in their orthodoxy is
defined exclusively as straight, white, heterosexual, violence for pleasure
seeking, basement dwelling, virgin males.
Second, according to their orthodoxy, relationships between PR firms,
journalists, developers, contest judges, and potential bosses up to and including
financial, romantic, cohabitation, sexual, and/or business are all okay so long
as you are a member of the party. Third,
in their orthodoxy, the appropriate social justice message is an acceptable substitute
for quality in a game or an appropriate substitute for software
being a game at all.

In 1984, two techniques were used to continually maintain
the orthodoxy of the party. Newspeak was
the fictional language that continually evolved as the means to make unorthodox thought
impossible. Doublethink is the act of
people accepting two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct. In our examples over the weekend, articles by
Leigh Alexander and Devin Wilson attempt Newspeak definitions of words we’re
all quite comfortable with, while applying Doublethink to do it. From the Alexander article:

Now
part of a writer’s job in a creative, human medium is to help curate a creative
community and an inclusive culture -- and a lack of commitment to that just
looks out-of-step, like a partial compromise with the howling trolls who’ve latched
onto ‘ethics’ as the latest flag in their onslaught against evolution and
inclusion.

This quote is particularly great because it supports the
orthodoxy by allowing a journalist to shed any hint of integrity to support
friends and business associates while simultaneously creating two opposite definitions
of writer: the first is that of the content creator, the second is that of the
objective journalist. By saying writer
in this paragraph, the 2 simultaneous conflicting definitions can be
interchanged at will in support of the orthodoxy as well as the greatest good
of all, cash money.

We
stop upholding “fun” as the universal, ultimate criterion for a game’s
relevance. It’s a meaningless ideal at best and a poisonous priority at worst.
Fun is a neurological trick. Plenty of categorically unhealthy things are
“fun”. Let’s try for something more. Many of the alternatives will have
similarly fuzzy definitions, but let’s aspire to qualities like “edifying”,
“healing”, “pro-social”, or even “enlightening”. I encourage you to decide upon
your own alternatives to “fun” in games (while avoiding terms like “cool” and
“awesome” and any other word that simply caters to existing, unexamined
biases).

In the Wilson playbook for killing gamers, an attempt to
create a second contradictory definition of the word “game” is made. This paragraph is attempting to apply more
Newspeak to what is already a Newspeak definition of “game”—nowhere in this
article is winning and losing mentioned; consequently, the focus is maintained
specifically on fun as a synonym for quality.
If successful, any attempt to tie entertainment value to quality is
written out of the lexicon, and orthodoxy is maintained.

This blog post wouldn’t be a proper comparison to Orwell if
we didn’t talk about dissenting opinions.
Games.on.net simply isn’t allowing
them at all if you aren’t on the orthodoxy bandwagon. Feminist Christina Hoff Sommers isn’t aligned
with the orthodoxy, and the
Ministry of Truth took issue with that.
Ben Quintero was demoted
for supporting #Gamergate in the face of orthodoxy; however, thanks to the
work of both #Gamergate and #NotYourShield, his status
was reinstated. These events are only the tip of the iceberg. To be honest, the hashes are moving faster
than I can keep up with, but the weekend has been full of examples of
detractors of the #GamerGate movement doing everything they can think of to
silence the movements to no avail.

So who are we in all this?
Believe it or not, we were expected to be the Proles. We were expected to be so busy fighting
amongst ourselves and mocking each other that we weren’t supposed to notice this
all go down when it started two weeks ago.
It is at this point that the comparison with Orwell breaks down because
the Proles were uneducated; conversely, the community of gamers is extremely
sharp. We are also used to a gaming
media that is less than forward about what gets written about whom for what
reasons. Thus, when the community of
gamers sees something that appears to not be up to scratch, so to speak, we
start to dig, and we did. In response to
that, we were told there was no issue. The
community of gamers rejected that notion on its face and started
#Gamergate. #Gamergate had no identity
in terms of race, gender, or sexual orientation beyond that of “gamer”; i

ndeed,
it was a coming together of the community of gamers unlike any seen in recent
years. The Ministry of Truth responded
with the 2 Minutes Hate on August 28th, suggesting that #Gamergate
was made up of nothing but the narrowest and most pejorative definition of
gamer. In response, #NotYourShield evolved
as a rejection of the orthodoxy presented in the 2 Minutes Hate on August 28th
as well as a means to combat orthodox anti-Gamergate attitudes on
social media, further reinforcing that gamer is a universal term agnostic of
race, gender, sexual orientation, or creed.
So that’s #Gamergate and #NotYourShield in a nutshell to me: a
simultaneous rejection of oppressive, totalitarian orthodoxy in the guise of
social justice by a group of fake journalists.

Finally tonight I want to acknowledge that every group has
knuckleheads. The community of gamers
has more than its fair share of knuckleheads; people who do take it as a
personal affront that we should be discussing representation in video games. The folks on the other side of the isle have
their share of knuckleheads as well; people who take it as a person affront
that #Gamergate and #NotYourShield might end a conversation about
representation in video games. There is
a conversation about representation that needs to be had, but it needs to be
had in terms of representation, not
inclusion. Also, I wanted to take this opportunity
to thank the Youtube folks out there who have been doing the digging and
finding the information to keep ignorant f-bombs like me up to speed. In particular, thank you Sargon of Akkad for
keeping the links in your videos, as they were invaluable in making this post. Most of all, thank YOU gamers of #Gamergate
and #NotYourShield. Keep fighting the good fight with dignity and class.

4 comments:

So because journalists are rightly appalled at misogynistic abuse and your own ignorance about how their profession works, you think you're living in a totalitarian state.

You are not a 'community'. You are fragment of a community. The gaming community is far more massive than the bleak, thuggish corner of it which is up in arms because journalists are no longer writing articles solely for them.

Orwell would have shaken his head at your absurd sense of entitlement and inability to see the wood for the trees. Meanwhile, you're embarrassing those of us who play games but don't suffer from a persecution complex. I have to explain to my friends that we're not *all* like that.

Something that is very important to realize is that this - https://i.imgur.com/iDgEZDf.png , which the gaming media followed to the letter, was written by someone who also said this- https://i.imgur.com/Cr0qN73.png So, who is being honest here? Who is being ethical and fair? Who is being trustworthy?

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